After months of campaigning and weeks of debates Susan Ellenberg pulled away from the rest of the field, securing about one-third of all the votes cast for Santa Clara County Supervisor District 4 in June 5’s primary elections. Currently former San Jose City Council member Pierluigi Oliverio sits in second place but by less than 200 votes ahead of rival council member Don Rocha.

Just three weeks after Dominic Caserta pulled out of the race in disgrace, it appears that the race may have shifted. It was reported that Caserta was a front runner in the race, but there was no basis for this in fact.

At the debates the candidates sounded remarkably similar, but clearly Susan Ellenberg was winning the “talking points” along with Oliverio, who carved out a position clearly to the right of all of the other candidates. Don Rocha relied on tested-and-true union-friendly positions, but failed to impress compared to voter-leader Ellenberg.

While it appears that Oliverio was far down in the polls, he was the most likely candidate that male Republican voters would support. It is unclear how many men and women voted for either candidate. But clearly even though there are more Democratic voters, there were so many candidates that the votes were clearly split amongs many candidates which allowed Oliverio to cruise into second place barely above Rocha. But it is so close that the automatic recount will most likely be started by the Registrar of Voters. The odds of the thousands of provisional ballots changing the ranking between the two candidates is not highly likely but very possible as there are only about 125 votes difference among a few thousand votes yet to count.